Remembering Daisy Love Merrick…
Live a larger life—the life you were created for—and change the world!

Tomorrow a neighboring pastor is going to his 8-year-old daughter’s memorial service. A few days ago he dressed up like a hobbit with her to watch this amazing story. Daisy Love Merrick has finished a 3-year battle with cancer. Full of hope she drew this fabulous picture when she was 6, explaining it to her dad by saying, “This is cancer, and I’m beating it!”

Her mother sent out a note for how to dress for the memorial service: “Please join us as we celebrate the strong, kind, brave, goofy, thoughtful, amazing girl we call Daisy Love. Please wear what you feel best in: sandy feet and boardshorts, tutu and snorkel mask, or the prettiest dress in your closet. Wear black only if you must, but I’m wearing what Daisy would like most. On her last night on earth, she requested we watch The Hobbit (70’s version) and dress like hobbits.”

The Hobbit invites you to experience a broader, fuller life. The movie begins with a small humanoid known as a hobbit invited by an angelic being to leave his chains of habit and fulfill his soul’s longing for a larger life. A hobbit is half the size of a large human and has leathery, hairy feet. The contrast between the hobbit’s contained, measured existence and the wandering wizard’s invitation begins like this:

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

“It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle….”

“The Bagginses had lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected…. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.”

After decades of absence, Gandalf the wizard, whom the author once described as an angelic being, returns to the hobbits’ beloved Shire in order to call on a Baggins. Gandalf declares to Bilbo Baggins, “I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging.”

Bilbo Baggins is thoroughly disinterested: “We are plain quiet folks and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them.”

Gandalf, however, is not easily turned away. “I will…send you on this adventure. Very amusing for me, very good for you—and profitable too, very likely, if you ever get over it.”

And in one night Bilbo Baggins shifts from respectability to signing a contract to become a burglar. This extraordinary document covers funeral arrangements in case of “incarceration, evisceration or incineration.”

You are created for a life that is abundant, overflowing. This is both for your fulfillment and to fulfill your critical role in the great cosmic drama. As Gandalf said to Lady Galadriel, “It’s the small things, the everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep evil at bay.”

Live a larger life—the life you were created for—and change the world!